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Thursday, February 28, 2013

It's been a while since i last posted anything here so i guess maybe it's time!

Not a whole lot has been going on of late of interest but there are a few things. To start, I've been giving myself a bit of a refresher on C++.

I started with Allegro 5 which is quite a nice little library. I built a simple little game engine skeleton to mirror, to some degree, the structure of an XNA game. The library seems to be really easy to use once you get setup (which is also fairly easy) and i was able to make significant progress in porting TinyGame (even if it isn't nearly as tiny anymore).

I next moved on to try out Cocos2D-X, a c++ cross platform port of iOS's Cocos2D. This ones setup proved to be much more of a pain. The documentation essentially has you adding a project to the existing solution which i find to be less than ideal. Once it is setup though, I found it even easier to use than Allegro in a lot of respects. I started work on a Tetris clone to try it out. The framework is fairly straightforward, though some things like keyboard input don't work out of the gate making things interesting on PC (makes sense as a mobile library I guess though).

Most recently I've returned to an older project of mine, currently labeled 2D Terrain Test. The core engine was already pretty stable, but I've been cleaning it up and adding new functionality. My primary objective is to fix the rope physics, but that requires a better environment to test in so I've been working on an in game level editor mode. The terrain system already supports several loading methods, both dynamic and from settings files, but there's currently no way to build them.

That's more or less all for now, not much for nearly a year without a post, but hey, there's been all sorts of distractions! =D Growing kids, Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs, Guild Wars 2, a myriad of indie games (Seriously though, if you're reading this go check out Intrusion 2 at your earliest convenience, it's epic!).